


The Star-Snuffer's Lovesong

by unintelligiblescreaming



Category: The Far Meridian (Podcast)
Genre: (sort of), Alternate Universe - Medieval, An Excessive Amount of Imagery, Don't Have to Know Canon, F/F, High Fantasy, Legends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 05:16:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19244581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintelligiblescreaming/pseuds/unintelligiblescreaming
Summary: A lost princess in a traveling lighthouse and an alchemist who stole the stars from the sky.--There’s a tale about the royal alchemist who animated people made of clay with words in their earthen skulls carved from sunlight. As the tale goes, she destroyed them in a fit of jealousy, for her body held only bone and blood and the saltwater-substance of cells, and she couldn’t stand to see another creature so touched by day-writ words when she herself could never be.There’s another tale that says the royal alchemist asked the king to build her a tower so she could climb up to the moon. The king tried, so the story claims, but even the highest tower couldn’t touch the sky, and she wept for so long that her tears formed a flood and swept the foundations away.None of the events in these stories are true, but if you shake them until they crack, you’ll see truth glimmering from within them.





	The Star-Snuffer's Lovesong

Gossip spreads in a relentless tide outward from the palace. It’s with a mix of apprehension and fondness that they say, _the king’s finest alchemist is rather odd, you know_. They say she orders barrels of wax and makes candles by her own hand, then lights them and watches them burn for hours upon hours until there’s no wax left, only smoke. They say she buries her face in her palms and murmurs about the ashen ghost of fire. They say she takes molten glass and bends it convex and concave, then carves it into lenses to let her see farther and farther, higher and higher, one more futile step toward the vault of heaven.  
  
As the gossip leaves the capital city and diffuses into the towns and farmland, it transmutes into legend. By the time it reaches the coastal villages, it’s become folklore. There’s a tale about the royal alchemist who animates people made of clay with words in their earthen skulls carved from sunlight. As the tale goes, she destroyed them in a fit of jealousy, for her body held only bone and blood and the saltwater-substance of cells, and she couldn’t stand to see another creature so touched by day-writ words when she could never be. There’s another tale that says the royal alchemist asked the king to build her a tower so she could climb up to the moon. The king tried, so the story claims, but even the highest tower couldn’t touch the sky, and she wept for so long that her tears formed a flood and swept the foundations away. None of the events in these stories are true, but if you shake them until they crack, you’ll see truth glimmering from within them.  
  
Ruth’s favorite story is the one about how the king asked her to turn lead to gold. In the story, she laughs—she's always laughing in these stories—and says, _lead to gold? Why would you ask for something so easy? The real trick is to melt down gold into a wish, or a smattering of crystal regrets, or a thin wire of longing._ The king says, _what use would I have with a wire made of longing? How would that add to my treasury?_ And the alchemist answers, _this wire, your highness, would be stronger than any your blacksmiths could make._  
  
There’s more after that, changing to fit whatever message about longing and desire the storyteller wishes. But Ruth likes to end it there because she’s not sure what purpose she should put her longing to. She’s not sure what use it could possibly have. She simply knows that it’s there.  
  
  
  
  
  
Restlessness drags Ruth’s feet from the palace to the vast wildernesses the kingdom clutches within its borders. She goes with a royal blessing. She was best friend’s with the king’s daughter, once, and he doesn’t mind that she needs time to wander the wilds and search for a way to better understand the cold-fire choreography of the stars and planets.  
  
There’s a patched traveling cloak on her shoulders and dust on her boots. She rarely recalls her dreams, though she wants to. She’s trapped by her heavy, clumsy flesh, and with clenched teeth and shaking hands she seeks a taste of the ephemeral.  
  
She finds a place in the hills where the only other voice is the cicadas and she layers her scream above theirs until her throat burns and her lungs ache with cold. The next day she talks to the mountain peaks as she travels, asking them if they’re tall enough, if they’re sturdy enough, and if they are, would they allow her to stand on their shoulders and brush her fingertips across the vault of the sky?  
  
“Would it feel like satin?” she wonders aloud, adjusting her pack. “Like silk? Like cotton? Like the idea of blue? Like the dream of black?”  
  
It’s been years since anyone else walked this road in the mountain ridge. It’s been years, too, since she’s spoken to anyone about anything more personal than a budget invoice or a request for leave. She doesn’t have friends. Just colleagues. And an employer, if you can call the king that. She used to speak to him more familiarly when she was young, back before the princess went missing, back when she and Peri were friends… but that was a long time ago.  
  
She spends entire days tossing her thoughts into the air, but no one answers. She gives up on speech eventually and sings instead, first under her breath and then loudly and with abandon, flinging “Oh My Darling Clementine” defiantly at the uncaring moon.  
  
Yet in the resounding quiet after the final verse, a voice not her own rumbles, “A lovely tune! You’re not _quite_ as good as the last one who came by singing, though.”  
  
“Who are you?” snaps Ruth, heart pounding.  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
“My name is Ruth. I’m a royal alchemist.”  
  
“Well, Ruth, I am the one who groaned and cried out as the king’s men carved out my insides and stole my treasure, leaving only songs of sin in its place. And you, from your rambling talk, are like every other alchemist: lonely and desperate enough to take hammer and tongs to the infinite.”  
  
Ruth considers this. She’s heard rumors of a deep voice crying out from the heart of an empty mine. She realizes she’s speaking with the soul of a mountain.  
  
“Sir,” she says carefully, “if you’d only allow me to climb you, I—”  
  
“What, so you can shear away a strip of night-dark? So you can pluck out the stars with your grimy fingers?”  
  
“I wouldn’t do that,” she says, stung. She’s not that selfish. She thinks.  
  
“I have no reason to believe that. You’d do well to take lessons from that other young lady! _She_ , at least, understood manners.”  
  
“What other young lady?”  
  
“The singer girl. She knew that song. She lives in a lighthouse that travels in a sea of fog.”  
  
“Lighthouses don’t travel. Things travel to lighthouses.”  
  
“Yet hers travels indeed, you presumptuous thing.”  
  
“Tell me about her,” says Ruth suddenly. A lighthouse: a building meant to call ships in from sea. She’s always been entranced by things that shed light.  
  
“I will do no such thing. Now get out before I send an earthquake to shake you into a landslide grave!”  
  
The rocks begin to scrape threateningly against each other, so Ruth runs.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The lighthouse and its owner becomes Ruth’s new fascination. She spends weeks traveling from town to town, gathering stories of a woman who trailed strange happenings in her wake. The folktales say the woman hums under her breath and grants memories wings. They say the woman has eyes distant as the horizon and never, ever gives out her name.  
  
One of the tales is more recent than the others, still a clever rumor rather than a legend forged from beautiful falsehood. She follows its trail until she stumbles upon something even more recent: a genuine sighting. A man tells her with excitement that a lighthouse was spotted this morning, appearing out of nowhere, perched on an island a few miles out from the coast. Ruth hires a sailboat and heads out into the waves.  
  
The lighthouse and the things that follow it linger on the liminal thresholds of the world, in the knife edge between one thing and the other. Ruth has spent all her life (since the princess vanished, though she doesn’t like to think it too loud) clutching at liminal things, only to find they slip out of her grasp like photons. She wants to find the lighthouse with a desperation that gleams silver, precious and quick to tarnish into hopelessness.  
  
And now she can see it, tall and strange and glorious, right there on the island—  
  
But the fog is coming in.  
  
The wind picks up. The spray batters the sails. The waves reach up and the storm breaks the sailboat in two.  
  
  
  
  
  
In a properly ordered world, Ruth’s corpse would have drifted down to a deep part of the ocean. Brine would live in her lung tissue and the currents would eagerly pull apart her bones. But instead, here in the threshold moment between living and drowning, time goes soft and sluggish. The light from above the dark water ripples and brightens, cold and alluring. And the roar of the storm and the furious waves turns lilting, dangerous, human.  
  
“Oh dear,” says the Tattered Woman. “You’re in a spot of trouble, aren’t you?”  
  
Help, Ruth wants to plead, but her mouth is full of saltwater.  
  
“I could save you, if you like. I could give you that, and even more. Everything you want could be yours. If you would only do a little something for _me…”_  
  
  
  
  
  
The king’s finest alchemist returns to the palace. Something locked away in the pumping valves of her heart glints colder and brighter, crystalline and sharp enough to cut. She tells no one about the journey she took or the lighthouse she failed to find. She spends her time alone in a workshop. And what does she do? She makes lock after lock of fiendish complexity and affixes them to the door.  
  
The king is puzzled by her obsession with security. She tells him she has some valuable things she wishes to protect.  
  
The Tattered Woman has given her the chance to hold light itself in her hands. She knows it’s selfish, but she is _so_ lonely.  
  
  
  
  
  
One by one, the stars vanish. The constellations choke on darkness and wink out. The king’s councillors have no answers. The wise men have no guidance. The other alchemists find no solution. And if anyone glimpses an unbearable brightness leaking through the keyholes of the locks on Ruth’s workshop door, they say nothing.


End file.
